Strategy: Skills Measurement Report

Skills Inventory Management August 2002

Tracking Your Changing Skills Inventory: Why It’s Now

Possible, and What It Means for Your Organization
Employee skills and change management—how can companies keep ahead? According to a recent survey
by CIO magazine, 56% of IT professionals reported having difficulty keeping up with their companies’ IT
skills needs.* As a result, leading companies like Cable and Wireless and IBM, as well as government
agencies such as the USDA continue to explore solutions that focus skills development toward meeting
evolving strategic needs.
What’s at stake? In today’s changing IT marketplace, the ability to dynamically gauge and manage
a changing skills inventory can yield a significant competitive advantage. By knowing where their skills 56% of IT
are, how fast they are developing, and exactly where their skills need to be, companies are achieving professionals
measurable improvement in productivity and profitability. reported having
In order to succeed, skills management strategies must address one basic tenet of business value difficulty keeping
creation—you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So how do you measure skills that are constantly
up with their
changing? The answer lies in a system capable of delivering repeatable and accurate skills assessments
over time. What makes such a system succeed where old methods fell short? The answer is simple: companies’ IT
online skills measurement systems can now fulfill three goals. They can deliver relevant, repeatable skills needs.*
results. They capture actionable information, and they require little if any administration on the part of
the enterprise. For today’s enterprise, the implications are significant.

Goal #1: Deliver Relevant, Repeatable Results

For many companies, skills assessments are frequently implemented on paper in a proctored environ-
ment, usually in coordination with a particular learning event or employee development milestone. While
such tests provide a static snapshot, they are of little use in managing the dynamics of skills develop-
ment in a constantly changing environment. What if you want to re-test employee proficiency in a particular
skill at some specified time after the initial assessment? Would you give the employee the same ques-
tions? Would the test-taker’s previous experience with the test distort the results? In order to achieve
relevant results, the skills assessment must challenge the test-taker every time.
One particular advance in online skills measurement provides a solution to these issues: Computer
Adaptive Testing (CAT) technology. CAT technology delivers online assessments that draw from a pool of
questions of varying difficulty as the test is taken. As a result, the user never takes the same test twice.
In addition, the assessment chooses the difficulty of each question based on the test-taker’s perform-
ance on previous questions, ensuring that even over repeat assessments of the same skill, users receive
challenging questions.
Dynamic question selection engines such as CAT enable significant advantages at the enterprise
skills management level. Formerly, to reassess skills or measure learning progress, companies had to
create new tests, develop multiple versions of a test, or simply re-administer the same tests to the same
test-takers (potentially compromising the validity of the results).
Dynamic question selection frees the enterprise from the burden of “creating” an assessment, and
it ensures a realistic score over multiple testings. From a technical standpoint, it is the adaptive nature
of this online technology that has freed the skills assessment from its single-event limitations.

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 Strategy: Skills Measurement Report
Skills Inventory Management August 2002

Goal #2: Capture Actionable Information

One of the major challenges companies find with traditional assessment methodology is the bluntness of
the results. When a training participant receives a simple pass/fail grade based on a post-training exam,
the result provides little if any insight into the test-taker’s strengths or weaknesses. The finality of a
pass/fail grade suggests that learning for that skill ends with that assessment, thus inhibiting self-
improvement. Similarly, employees are often simply asked to provide subjective self-assessments of their
skills. The result is usually too inaccurate or lacking in detail to enable a relevant comparison to future
assessments. Companies are now addressing the challenge of capturing value by leveraging detailed
scores through flexible reporting enabled by online assessment systems.
Web- or Intranet-delivered skills assessments facilitate detailed scoring. When an individual takes
an assessment, even a minute skill improvement will be captured by the system. For decision-makers
ranging from the line-level manager to the executive, such results can provide telling details needed to
validate training, identify operational skills gaps, and most importantly, capture and record improvement Many companies
over time. have taken advantage
of skills measurement
Goal #3: Automate the Assessment Administration Process
When the burden of creating and delivering challenging skills assessments over time becomes too great,
technology to arrive
an organizational skills inventory management strategy may lose momentum. Given that employee skills at a simple solution
can represent up to 85% of a company’s assets in today’s economy, the operational detail of skills to the administration
assessment administration can have major strategic implications. problem: employee
Many companies have taken advantage of skills measurement technology to arrive at a simple self-service.
solution to the administration problem: employee self-service. By providing access to assessments
through the employee Intranet, companies are eliminating the scheduling and implementation burden.
With continuous access, the employee views the assessment less as an intrusion and more as a tool for
capturing skills improvement. Meanwhile, online access facilitates multiple assessments, delivering
valuable skills data that helps the company track skills inventory and rate of improvement.

Eliminating the Guesswork—Skills Measurement Sheds Light Across the Enterprise

Thanks to advances that are enabling repeat online assessment, skills measurement now benefits all
facets of business, from recruiting and training, to management, marketing and channel relations. Until
recently, managers frequently had to rely on disparate skills data to assemble teams, make hiring and
outsourcing decisions, and assess their skills assets. Now, they are eliminating much of the guesswork
involved in these vital decisions by relying on accurate skills data. Repeatable skills measurement pro-
vides a key source of improvement benchmarking data and ROI metrics that is delivering bottom-line
results enterprise-wide for today’s smartest companies.

*From CIO.com
Mid 2002 IT Staffing Update

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